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Words Fail…

Last year, I wrote about Korzybskis semantic theoriesespecially the problems generated among humans who confuse words (symbols) with the objects they represent. Since Im in the business of words, Im forever hopeful that well figure out how to use them well, and resolve our differences with rational discourse. However, having

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Silver Cloud / Dark Lining?

At the risk of channeling the late Andy Rooney, I have a bone to pick with cloud computing and its adherents. Like all business trends, The Cloud (capitalization required) has achieved meaningless buzzword status. It has also attracted its share of pretenders, predators, and puzzled participants. Lets be clear from

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Print Different

This is typically the time of year when columnists, pundits, and bloggers look back at the past year, and ahead to what the next one may bring. Assuming the planet will not end altogether on December 21st, here’s my retrospective and glimpse forward for the printing industry. For some, the

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Paper Power

Elsewhere in this space, Ive written about the environmental misconceptions surrounding print and paper. As it turns out, the print medium is potentially[1] the most sustainable and least problematic when it comes to energy consumption and carbon emissions. However, it turns out that paper is not only benign environmentally, but

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Fear of the Dark

Admittedly, Halloween would have been a better holiday for this post, but since superstitions have no fixed season, I thought Id dredge up an old one namely, printing as a dark art and ask if those same fears cloud our thinking today. When Gutenberg’s vision of print manufacturing first emerged,

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What Makes Paper So Special?

When discussing the merits of print communication, pundits like me tend to fixate specific applications like publishing or business communication, but don’t say much about the medium itself: paper. There are preconceptions about its inconvenience in dealing with large quantities of data (true) or its negative impact on the environment

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First Impressions

It never pays to resist or deride innovators especially in the world of print. The clerics and inquisitors who warned us about the dangerous innovation of Herr Gutenberg (himself a pious man) ended up on the losing side of that technology argument. William Morris decried the industrialization of the printed

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Consumer Media Choices: Paper or Silicon?

Not all that long ago, our communications choices were limited to print and some form of analog broadcast. Computers changed how we created media, especially for the printed page, but not the medium itself. Of course that all changed with the Inter-Web and its latest incarnation: mobile devices. In the

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The Perils of Print+Mobile

Last week, I journeyed to Chicago for this years Graph Expo, the annual trade ritual for the struggling print industry in North America. Occurring only a few months after drupathe worldwide version of that experience Graph was something of a re-hash. My editor at Printing Impressions acknowledged this when he

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Survival On Demand

In nature, a species has to either adapt to an ever-changing environment, and increasingly efficient competition, to survive. Sudden, drastic changes make survival less likely. One popular notion is that such a change an asteroid impact, an influx of volcanic activity, or what have you brought about the extinction of

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Printing and Saving Trees

One of the most popular misconceptions about print is that it is harmful to the environment. Grinding up trees and using chemical-based inks for printing is (we are told) unsustainable. Large retailers, banks, and telecom companies tell their customers that switching to e-billing will save trees. For the most part,

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Print Is…

The question is print dead? is superficial nonsense. The real question should be: What is print, and why should we care? Print is everywhere, and is likely to continue for many, many years. Putting oil-based ink on ground-up trees may decline,* but it will be replaced by other printing methods